Alumni all over Canada lament loss of Mount Royal theatre program

Photo courtesy Don Dixon
Mount Royal alumnus Daniel Briere’s (here with Sarah Topham as Juliet) first time playing Romeo was as understudy in a Shakespeare in the Park production, which he was cast in as a student. He is now playing Romeo at The Stratford Festival.Photography by Don Dixon

Ava Jane Markus credits the intimate focus of Mount Royals’ Theatre program with providing her with the tools that led to her starring in shows such as Alberta Theatre Projects’ The Apology, part of the 2013 Enbridge playRites Festival, and Ghost River Theatre’s Reverie.

Gavin Young, Calgary Herald
Calgary actor Tyrrell Crews, seen here as Mr. Darcy in Theatre Calgary’s Pride and Prejudice, credits the Mount Royal theatre program for giving his life a direction and focus that led him to being hired to act at the Stratford Festival.PAT McGRATH
/ THE OTTAWA CITIZEN

Photo courtesy Outside the March Theatre
Mount Royal theatre alumni Ava Jane Marcus in Terminus, which won four 2013 Toronto Theatre Critics Awards, more than any other play.

Photo courtesy Don Dixon
Mount Royal alumnus Daniel Briere as Romeo in The Stratford Festival’s 2013 production, joining, among others, William Shatner, Christopher Walken and current Stratford artistic director Antony Cimolino as actors who have performed that part at Stratford.Cylla von Tiedemann

For Mount Royal University, it will be one less diploma program and fewer part-time instructors to pay.

For Calgary’s cultural community, it will create one gaping hole in a delicate ecosystem.

And for The Stratford Festival, Canada’s largest and most economically robust theatre company, it will mean looking elsewhere for its next Romeo.

On Monday, Mount Royal University’s board of directors will vote to suspend the theatre program, one of eight diploma programs the institution is in the process of suspending as a result of a budget cut from the provincial government of seven per cent, which came after promises of a two per cent increase. (That’s in addition to having its funding frozen in 2010 at college-level $87 million, rather than being upped to university-level funding of $106 million, as it had anticipated receiving).

The cuts were made by Premier Alison Redford’s government to help balance the provincial government budget, a move Redford says was a necessity.

Theatre professionals in Calgary and across the country whose careers were was launched at Mount Royal, however, are watching from across the country with sadness and apprehension at the decision.

As far away as Stratford, where this summer’s Romeo, Daniel Briere, got his start in Mount Royal’s theatre program, the loss of the program is being lamented.

“I feel like it’s been 10 years of preparation for a role like this,” says Briere. ““I started working on it with (voice coach) Jane MacFarlane at Mount Royal, when I was there, 10 years ago.”

It was while he was studying at Mount Royal that Briere landed an amateur role as Romeo, little aware that he was a decade away from playing the same lovestruck fool in Stratford.

“The last time I had done Romeo was at Shakespeare in the Park on Prince’s Island in 2004,” he adds. “I had actually understudied Romeo in that production and got to go on one time.

“That,” he says, “was really great for me to start putting all those pieces together at that point, and I’ve been continuing to work on it — so here I am, doing it (now) on the big (Stratford) stage.”

Ava Jane Markus, who was just in town performing in The Apology at the Alberta Theatre Projects’ earlier this year, understands the need to crunch numbers better than most. That’s because she’s been getting a crash course from the commercial producers who work for the Mirvish organization in Toronto, which this year produced Terminus, an independent theatre project Marcus acted in (and originally co-produced with Mitchell Cushman of Outside the March Theatre).

At the 2013 Toronto Theatre Critics Awards this week, Terminus won four awards, more than any other show.

Marcus says if Mirvish provided her with producer finishing school, Mount Royal was the place that planted the seeds for her to hit such lofty heights.

“It (Mount Royal) was just so much more than a little theatre program,” she says. “It was turning out people not just with acting skills and technical skills, but people who understood how to build relationships within a room — how to self-produce, and this is the foundation of what I’m doing with my life.”

That small class size and the nature of the two-year diploma program, which is shorter than the four-year degree-granting program at the University of Calgary, is what landed the program on the university’s chopping block, along with the jazz program, journalism and others.

But number crunchers who see inefficiencies and duplications in those programs see the program differently than Tyrell Crews, who says Mount Royal’s theatre program changed his life.

Crews spoke to the Herald from Stratford as well, which he joined following a run as Mr. Darcy in Theatre Calgary’s production of Pride and Prejudice. In Stratford, Crews is understudying one of the Musketeers in The Three Musketeers, and later this summer, playing one of the leads in The Merchant of Venice.

But at one time, Crews was a 17-year-old Calgary guy hanging with the wrong sort of crowd, who needed direction in life.

“It really kind of changed who I was at the time,” he adds. “I wasn’t hanging around with the best kind of people. I wasn’t doing the smartest things after hours.

“It really gave me the chance to focus on something, and take ownership of that.”

For actors, who relished the conservatory programs’ intimacy and emphasis on performance training, the loss of Mount Royal’s theatre program is painful.

But for Calgary’s theatres, it also was a place that provided young, skilled technical staff to run the lights, do the sound and ensure that the show went on as scheduled.

“It will impact us more than some of the bigger theatres, because the scale we are producing on (at Lunchbox), it means a lot of our technical staff are early career, and get more experience then go on to work at the bigger houses.

“For us, that ground level of technical talent is very important — so it’s alarming, actually.”

While the program hasn’t officially been terminated, it’s being shut down in increments. According to university spokesperson Paula Arab, it’s already suspended intake of new students into the program, but will offer enough curriculum for students already enrolled to complete it next year.

The next step is to formally suspend the program. Basically, says Arab, the decision comes down to preserving curriculum that offers a university degree, something the two-year theatre program does not.

“Because the University of Calgary has a degree program, we would have a really good chance of never getting a degree program (in theatre),” Arab says. “We have to focus on our core services, which is offering degrees.”

However the board votes Monday, it still must be signed off on by Education and Enterprise Minister Thomas Lukaszuk.

Lukaszuk did not return calls for comment.

Ultimately, even Mount Royal theatre alumni acknowledge that sometimes, money problems can get the best of big dreams.

What saddens all of them is that the next generation of Stratford cast members might grow up in the 403, but to make it there, they’ll have to train elsewhere.

“I haven’t really been able to return to Calgary (as an actor),” he says. “I still have family there, and have always wanted to work in Calgary, but because my training happened in a completely different area of the country, the roads to the public stage in Calgary have shifted from where they were when I was at Mount Royal.

“Had I decided to stay there,” he adds, “I probably would have a lot more opportunity in the past six years or so to be on the stages at Theatre Calgary or Alberta Theatre Projects or theatres like that in Calgary.”

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